INSANITY, INC., by Carolyn McKinnon, R.N., Audenreed Press, Brunswick, Maine, 266 pages, $15.95, cloth.

BEING THERE: Profiles of Mental Illness, by Karlene K. Hale, Dilligaf Publishing, Ellsworth, Maine, 109 pages, $15, paper.

What’s going on in the current statewide crisis in mental health care? Should the state hospitals at Augusta and Bangor be shut down? The state seems to want us to believe that there are fewer people who need to be institutionalized, but is this true? Why was the new private Acadia Hospital built in Bangor if there is less need? The fact that it is thriving tells us what?

Certainly, it is helpful for taxpayers who are concerned to have two new books from insiders who help throw some light upon the confusing controversy.

One is a novel, “Insanity, Inc.,” by Carolyn McKinnon, a registered nurse who once worked at what was then called the Bangor State Hospital. McKinnon now operates A Small World Day Care Center in Bangor.

“All of us are sadistic under our tightly controlled social masks,” one of the psychologists in the novel says at one point, “and being given the opportunity to master people brings our sadism right up through the surface like a fist through a door!”

While no Charles Dickens, McKinnon obviously believes in the power of the novel to expose, and even try to right, some of the wrongs in our society. As a roman a clef, “Insanity, Inc.,” is most important as a history of what kind of place the Bangor State Hospital used to be several administrations ago. It all rings sadly true; and anyone who has worked in such an institution, or in a regular hospital, nursing home, prison, or even certain schools, will be alternately fascinated and disgusted by the all-too-typical behavior and mind-set of those often in positions of control over other people’s lives.

The novel opens with a naive and idealistic young nurse named Laurie Canaday, a native of Somerset, Maine, who is excited to begin work at the Dunton State Mental Institution which, like Bangor, is located on top of a hill.

“It’s so removed from the world up here, the way I always imagined it would be,” she says, and “removed from the world” is the correct phrase for such a place, and maybe for all of the old-fashioned mental hospitals.

While many of the horrors of Bedlam have been more artistically and dramatically presented in such popular novels and films as “The Snake Pit,” “The Three Faces of Eve” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” this novel is a real-life horror story, not told by Stephen King. And Maine people need to pay close attention to any truth offered about Maine’s institutions.

As Laurie is shown about Dunton, she witnesses such scenes as the following: “As the steel door to a `back ward’ on the `male side’ clanged shut behind them, Laurie’s eyes were drawn to the floor, totally unprepared for the tragedy that began to play itself out in front of her. White-clad human forms lined either side of that long, barren corridor. Some were curled up in fetal positions as though trying to regress to a stage when life was more merciful. Others sat apathetically on heavy, wooden benches, staring blankly into the empty spaces in front of them, or walked about aimlessly, pacing the same rhythmic, dead-end patterns on the floor like zoo animals in cages.”

Laurie’s most wrenching personal experience comes when her former boyfriend is admitted to the hospital in such a sad condition that he doesn’t even recognize her.

Over the course of several years, and a couple of changes in administration, Laurie learns to deal with officious and inefficient supervisors; petty bureaucrats and their time-consuming paperwork; young psychologists with advanced degrees and plans for new experiments that will enhance their own careers; firm supporters of the status quo playing their political games; all manner of terribly neglected patients; and incomptetent, unlicensed doctors who make such comments as “Just look at all these useless bodies here. I’d like to take some chloroform around and put them all to sleep permanently.”

While “Insanity, Inc.” is about the past conditions of a Maine state hospital, the book “Being There,” subtitled “Profiles of Mental Illness, ” by Karlene K. Hale is about the present situation involving all of Maine’s mental health care facilities.

In her introduction, Hale explains why she wrote this book. “This book really began more than five years ago, when my only child, Elizabeth Washburn, was diagnosed as manic depressive at the age of sixteen. She probably had been sick for some years before that, but my husband and I attributed her spectacular temper tantrums, her spending sprees, her midnight walks, her weeping spells, and her flights of fancy to a difficult adolescence. As a young child, she was beautiful, insightful, sensitive, highly intelligent, and very social. By seventh grade, there was moodiness, increasing absenteeism from school, projects that were started but never finished, and a general sense of unhappiness.”

Because of her experiences with her daughter, Hale says she “developed an interest in all mental illness. I learned that most people with this disease become impoverished, that they lack adequate housing, and are shunned and discriminated by society. The mentally ill daily feel the piercing eye of scorn for something they cannot help, or they feel the condescending hand of pity. Yet there are triumphs in the face of adversity, dramatic stories of recovery, and of fighting back against a system that often fails its most vulnerable citizens. This book tells some of those stories, through the words and eyes of the mentally ill and family members.”

In her foreward, titled “What is Mental Illness?” Hale brings us up to date on the subject, especially about the number of drugs that are used. “Major mental illness can be divided into two categories. Thought disorder and mood disorders … both illnesses are now considered to be biologically caused by chemical imbalances in the brain.”

Besides the profile of her own daughter, Hale includes other profiles of Maine people suffering from mental illness from all walks of life. In a profile titled “We’re Human Beings, Too,” Mark LaValle of Gardiner, a former basketball player, says, “Mental illness robs you of your whole life.” Hale says, “Life becomes so upside down that only the Furies reign.” At one point, Hale quotes John Shaw, the director of Kennebec Valley Mental Health Center, who is “convinced the whole system of state support for the mentally ill is in chaos, in crisis.”

While Carolyn McKinnon gives us something of the history of the Bangor State Hospital, Hale tells about the background of the Augusta State Hospital, now known as Augusta Mental Health Institute. It was built in the 1840s as “an asylum for Maine’s insane population.” It was built originally to house only 300 people, but by the 1950s there were as many as 1,700 patients in a multibuilding complex.

In the summer of 1988, during a heat wave with no air conditioning, five patients died from the heat. Eleven patients filed lawsuits, the hospital was way overcrowded, and the barrage of complaints and questions that began hasn’t let up yet.

According to Hale, “Patients were being dumped into towns and cities with no place to live, no network of services, and little follow-up care. A number of the mentally ill wound up on the streets, sick and alone.”

Karlene Hale is a career journalist who has worked for the Kennebec Journal and the Bangor Daily News. Her husband, John Hale, is the Augusta correspondent for the NEWS.

Both Carolyn McKinnon and Karlene Hale are good, concerned writers and citizens, who have provided their state and fellow citizens with some important information during this mental health care crisis.

Sanford Phippen is a writer who teaches English at Orono High School.